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Notes -
New footage of ICE shooter
Forgive another high-level post but the body cam (or cell phone?) footage of the cop who shot has been released by AlphaNews and this may significantly change perceptions of what happened (to those willing to have perceptions changed):
https://x.com/alphanews/status/2009679932289626385?s=46
To my eyes it appears that:
The ICE agent is clearly hit by her car and goes down
The ICE agent was not standing in front of her car but walking from one side to another
The driver’s wife is not passively observing but actively shouting at the agents (this should undermine the idea that the driver and her wife were somehow neutral people accidentally caught up in everything)
Perhaps most importantly, but maybe most open to interpretation, it appears to me that the driver looks directly at the ICE agent before driving forward. From this bodycam angle, her face is clearly shown looking directly ahead where the officer is seconds before she moves her car forward.
I suppose a lot of new interpretations are possible, but to me this video footage clearly debunks several going interpretations I have seen proposed. At the very least, maybe reasonable people can agree that the cop did not shoot the driver in cold blood from the side window.
I would also not be surprised to see the idea spread that this new video is AI.
Edit: per corrections from others below, this is not bodycam but cell phone footage (my mistake as it’s clearly even labeled as such) and this explains why it tumbles at the end of the video. Thanks!
I don't find this video particularly clarifying.
I am generally avoiding the discourse around this because I find it so tiresomely tribal and bad-faith on all sides. Rightists screeching that of course Good had it coming for (rationalizations/justifications-but-basically-because-she's-Other-Tribe), leftists screeching that this was murder because (ICE-is-fascist).
It's remarkable that people can look at very short video clips and conclude very firmly and confidently what was in the minds of both the driver and the ICE agent(s). I've watched all the videos from various angles and I have opinions, but I do not think anyone can honestly claim they know what the intentions, state of mind, or even level of awareness of any of the parties involved was. I think it's entirely possible that any of the following could be true (though I have opinions about their relative probability, I do not believe anyone who claims certainty, I think you're just matching your priors to a convenient conclusion):
(a) Good was intentionally trying to run the ICE agent over.
(b) Good panicked and hit the accelerator without thinking.
(c) Good was just trying to drive away and didn't even register there was an agent in the way.
(d) The ICE agent legitimately believed he was in mortal danger and shot someone he thought was trying to kill him.
(e) The ICE agent was a poorly-trained thug who shot a woman who defied his authority.
(f) This was a tragedy with no bad guys, Good panicked in a situation she shouldn't have been in, the ICE agent reacted on an adrenaline dump.
(f) Other variations.
Before your knee flexes and you start slamming your keyboard to argue any of these points, read again what I said: all of these are possible. I am not saying they are all equally likely. But if you say no, (a) or (b) or (c) or (f) are impossible or implausible, you're not being honest. You don't know. You can't read anyone's mind and you can't analyze what was going in in a split-second of video from "eye contact" or a swerve or which direction someone jumped or what someone shouts or mutters.
I have concluded that almost everyone (including our Motte effort-posters) forms a conclusion based not on actually trying to analyze videos and consider evidence, but rather, how they feel about ICE, ICE protesters, immigrants, and Trump. You probably think it was a good shoot if you hate immigrants and lesbian protesters, and you'd think it was a good shoot if there was video of the ICE agent literally walking up behind her and shooting her in the back of the head. You probably think it was a bad shoot if you hate Trump and ICE, and you'd think it was a bad shoot if there was video of Good shouting "I'm going to kill you!" before gunning it straight at a group of ICE screaming for her to stop.
Two observations about this particular video:
I found clarifying against the "she didn't even hit him/it was just a nudge" arguments. Helluva 'nudge.'
Otherwise agreed, and the people making those arguments aren't going to change for the reasons you mention.
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Look, you drive a car directly at a cop while they're yelling at you to stop, you're gonna get shot. The footage doesn't change this. ICE is probably not the shining example of highly professional policing, but there's no police agency that wouldn't have shot her. Yes, she may have been trying to escape rather than kill him, but it doesn't change anything in practice. This woman made a very stupid decision and died for it.
Honestly, I think they may be in the top 10%. Every time I hear about an atrocity and can find evidence, the worst I see is them being normal cop-aggressive. The big exception is when I heard about them shooting a reporter with a beanbag round. Turned out that happened... but it was actually LAPD, not ICE.
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Agreed. And?
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Let's say that Good was intentionally trying to run over the ICE agent and that the ICE agent legitimately believed in he was in mortal danger and shot someone he thought was trying to kill him. I don't think either claim is likely, but let's grant them for the sake of argument. I still don't think that justifies the shooting for two reasons, each of which is enough on its own to make a self-defence claim untenable.
The first is that shooting her could not have reasonably been expected to stop the car. He's right in front of it and as we saw in the other videos, it already had enough momentum to continue until she crashed into another car. That's only the first shot too. The second and third were fired from the side. He's not justified in shooting her to stop an imminent threat if it is unreasonable for him to think the shots might stop the imminent threat. And if I understand the law correctly, each shot has to be justified on its own. The second two shots cannot be justified on the grounds that the firing started when there was an imminent threat.
The second reason is that he went against his police training and placed himself in harm's way. I believe this goes against the training provided by the Department of Homeland Security. My understanding of the law is that you lose your right to claim self-defence if you wrecklessly put yourself into the dangerous situation that left yourself no option but to use deadly force.
It seems to me that any self-defence claim has to argue that it's reasonable for the ICE agent to make a poor split second decision about the risk the car posed because of how little time he had to think about it, while somehow not undermining the claim that it was reasonable for him to walk in front of the vehicle that he had so much trouble assessing the danger of. If it's inherently difficult to make a split second decision about whether the vehicle poses an imminent threat sufficient to justify killing the driver, that makes it all the more unreasonable to walk in front of the car in the first place. If it was reasonable to walk in front of the car and pull out his gun when it started moving, then he had to have been confident in his ability to make split second decisions that accurately determined the risk posed by the car moving towards him.
Even granting for the moment that this is true, there is not, in fact, an exception in self defense for futility.
A person defending themselves is not necessarily required to re-evaluate after each act. The three shots were fired within one second, during which he was hit by the vehicle. This applies to civilians in anti-gun states, even -- it was a point in the Bernie Goetz trial.
Even if true, this would not defeat self defense.
There's no such law, even in Minneapolis.
It is not enough for there to be a reasonable belief of an offence which exposes the actor to great bodily harm or death. The killing must be "necessary in resisting or preventing the offence".
https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/cite/609.065
That isn't true. The person must continuously evaluate whether the threat is still there. Everything is based on the reasonableness standard. If the time was so short that it the person did not have time to reassess and notice that the car had passed, then he would not be guilty, but the permissibility of the first shot doesn't automatically excuse all subsequent shots. One second is enough time for him to notice the car passing. He had to be looking where he was shooting, especially as a police officer and would have to have seen that he was shooting through the side window. He had to turn his body to track her in order to aim the second and third shots at her. If he can process all that enough to successfully land those shots (assuming they contributed to her death), then he can make the conscious decision to stop shooting. He doesn't have to think about it carefully to figure out that a car driving away from him isn't a threat. It should be intuitive.
It's not as though the car had gone from heading right at him during the first shot to turning away within one second. Before he took his first shot, I would say about half a second, the car had already started turning away. He took his first shot from the side of the car, with most of his body well out of the cars path.
By the way, it does not appear that he was hit by the vehicle. There are a couple videos where it seems like he might have been. There is a low-quality video from far away where it's hard to make out what's going on where it appears he might have been pushed by the vehicle. But if you line it up in timing with the video from back of the car, you can see that that can't be what happened because at that moment, his torso well to the left of the car. It's already passing him by. What must be going on is that he's farther back than it appears he's pushing off with his hands. You can see in another video that he leads forward and onto the roof of the car, but that his torso is largely clear.
The cell phone video makes it look like he was hit, especially if, like many people, you think it's body cam footage. But you don't actually see anything at that point. You hear the car collide with the phone. It's probably just his hand holding the phone landing on the car. There is actually no way to tell from this video whether his body and the car make contact, because the phone is facing the sky at that point.
It absolutely would. Police officers are specifically trained not to deliberately put themselves into situations where lethal force is the only option. If a police officer goes against his training and then decides to use the time he could have used to get out of the way to pull out his gun, then he is not acting reasonably.
https://law.justia.com/cases/minnesota/supreme-court/1967/40004-1.html
This is the special police officer use of force statute, not the regular self-defense one (which also applies). However, the conditions here are satisfied, since fleeing a peace officer (609.487) is an offense and shooting, while it may not have prevented him being hit, did stop that offense.
I don't think that's correct. I don't see where it says it's limited to the police.
The offence is not fleeing the police. The offence would be hitting him with her car.
Because you didn't bother to look even after having it pointed it out. 609.065 refers back to 609.06, which is all about the police.
609.065 would cover the fleeing. The fleeing was an "offense which the actor reasonably believes exposes the actor or another to great bodily harm or death".
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Keeping your assumptions, she attacked a cop with a lethal weapon. Don't do that :shrug:
Why did she think resisting arrest was smart? Fight in court.
Anything about him walking in front of the car... They were arresting her, what else were they supposed to do? Politely ask her from 10 feet away and say darn when she speeds away?
It's crazy that even with the given assumptions, there's no blamn on her actions. I think that's telling about your bias.
I'm defending anything that she did. I just don't think it's relevant.
Standard practice would be to approach the driver's side window and politely ask her to step out of the car. Even arresting her was not reasonable. She was blocking a lane of traffic. It's not a big deal. Just give her a ticket.
I'm not saying any of this is legally necessary, but they should have been more tactful about the whole thing. There are a lot of videos of ICE going around where they are unnecessarily aggressive with people. That is naturally going to make situations like these more dangerous.
But regardless of what they were trying to accomplish with her, no, it is absolutely a stupid idea to stand in front of the car. That accomplishes nothing. The only reason one could give for doing that would be to prevent her from leaving. But that's only reasonably if you are highly confident that she's not going to run you over, which completely undermines any self-defence claim. And even in that case, police officers are told not to do that because it's dangerous.
I don't really understand what point you're trying to make. That's absolutely a preferrable outcome than what happened. So are you saying that it's better they kill her than let her get away? It isn't legal for them to do that, as frustrating as it may seem. Minnesota does not have the death penalty for evading arrest.
So, while I don't think that they needed to approach from ten feet away and do nothing when she fled, if you genuinely think that and killing her were the only two options, I don't see how that justifies killing her.
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Doesn't matter. It may be a bad idea tactically, but it does not lose him his legal or moral right to self-defense. You can draw your gun when a bad guy has his gun trained on you, and I would consider that unlikely to stop the threat, but that doesn't mean you're not defending yourself.
Each shot is justified by the same reasons as the first one is justified because humans do not make decisions that quickly. We are talking about a time frame of 1 second. See my other reply here.
Of course it does.
Shooting her wasn't necessary in preventing the offence because it cannot have prevented the offence.
Each shot is justified by the same reasons as the first one is justified because humans do not make decisions that quickly. We are talking about a time frame of 1 second.
I'm not sure what to say other than I think it's absurd to suggest people have reaction times that are that slow. In that second he was able to track the vehicle as it turned and away, maintaining his aim as his line of sight moved from the side of the windshield over to the side of the car. The only thing his brain needed to process was the fact that he was at the side of the car. I don't think it takes anything close to a full second to visually process where an object is.
If it really were split seconds, then I would buy this argument, but I've watched the video many times and I think he had lots of time to process the situation. I don't even think the first shot was justifiable, so he only had that much more time to process the second shots. It's not the case that once the first shot was justifiable, the subsequent shots are automatically justfiable if they are close enough together. Each shot needs to be justified based on the totality of the circumstances, which includes the amount of processing he had done before the firing of the first shot.
I just think this requires a remarkable amount of leeway for how slow his processing is allowed to be to say he was justified in firing at that point, but I'm not sure how to prove that.
It says "resisting or preventing" an offense, not just preventing an offense. Do you agree that he was at least resisting the offense?
This is the problem right here. You get to watch it as many times as you want, while he can only go through the situation one time. If he was able to replay the situation exactly as it played out, I'm sure he could have made decisions that didn't involve shooting her. But it's like, well, have you ever played video games? Have you ever made all the right decisions in the game on the first try? No, you don't. You die in the game a lot and only beat the game after several attempts at playing the exact same situations over and over again. But of course, real life is not a video game, and when someone's life is on the line it's justified for them to use deadly force in response to an imminent deadly threat, even if you can make an argument that they didn't have to (because you can always make that argument for every scenario under the sun).
Obviously he had enough time, because he was able to draw his gun and use it. If she had an instant kill-death laser controlled by her brain, or something, even the fastest draw in the West wouldn't be able to stop her. But no, I don't think that's what you mean. I think you're saying that he had lots of time to process the situation and choose a decision that didn't involve shooting her (or shooting her less), which I think is flat-out incorrect.
No, I don't.
I don't need to watch it to think about what I would have done in that situation. I only need to have watched it to figure out what he would have already known having been there.
Being a police officer is not like playing a video game. You are not supposed to put yourself into dangerous situations where people's lives are on the line unneccessarily. You are supposed to do what you can to avoid those situations. Video games are designed to have high rates of failure. Policing is not.
His training and situational awareness should have been sufficient for him to avoid killing anyone in the vast majority of similar situations. He should have taken steps to make the situation as safe as possible.
Why not?
You keep thinking that he would have known more than what a reasonable officer put in his same position would have known. My point was that perhaps watching it multiple times biases you to see certain things as obvious and known when they were not.
I agree! But if you're saying this, then you don't seem to appreciate my point enough, so let me rephrase. He only gets to go through the situation once, he does not get to do it again. You, however, get to watch it multiple times. You are the one who is playing a video game. And, for that matter, everyone who is discussing this situation (including me). It's why I discount a lot of things in the videos that may seem "obvious" to you, because I can't imagine that I could do any better were I to be placed in the same position and didn't know what was going to happen. If I knew how everything was going to play out, I could definitely handle the situation without using deadly force. But if I had to go through it for the first time and had no idea what she was going to do? I don't think so.
Imagine if all knowledge of this event was erased and you had to watch the video again for the first time. Do you really think that you would have noticed all the things in the video that you argue he should have known? Do you notice these sorts of details in any video you watch for the first time? There's that famous experiment of the gorilla walking by in the background of a video of people playing basketball, and people (focused on counting the number of passes) consistently fail to notice the gorilla. You seem to think that you could notice the gorilla, if you watched the video for the first time without knowing that there was going to be a gorilla. Is that right?
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Aside from your other misunderstandings of self defense law, standing in front of a stationary car is not recklessly putting yourself in a dangerous situation.
Then why are the police told not to do it? What does it accomplish? If it was reasonable for him to think he was going to die the second the car started moving, how is that consistent with the idea that it wasn't reckless to stand there?
Even shooting her did not prevent the car from coming at him. Lots of his defenders are arguing that he was both at imminent risk of severe bodily harm or death and that the car did in fact hit him, even though he shot her three times. If we grant that, then we have to admit that he was doing something very dangerous.
The police are allowed to do dangerous things, but not without sufficient purpose to justify the risk. What was accomplished by putting himself in that position? If we grant everything necessary to say that it was reasonable for him to be there, then what he must have been doing was helping to detain her by creating a situation where she could not flee without giving him an excuse to kill her. The police are explicitly told not to do that, and the outcome of this event shows exactly why.
The law is not actually set up to create death traps for those who don't cooperate with the police. Self-defence law revolves around preventing death, not around giving the police sufficient excuse to kill so as to induce cooperation.
By the way, the car was not stationary. It was backing up while he placed himself in front of it and then stopped for less than a second before moving forward. He knew she was being uncooperative and heard her wife telling her to drive away. He should have known what was about to happen and seemed to anticipate it when he moved his phone to his left hand and then drew his gun.
Health and safety
Reduces lost-time accidents and cuts down on paperwork.
Undertaking a calculated risk is not inherently reckless. If it were, police would never engage in any interactions. The overwhelming majority of people do not in fact drive their vehicles at police.
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Things that are safe in the parking lot of a grocery store are not necessarily safe during the apprehension of a suspect. I have seen people argue here that we can not conclude from the fact that Good was a middle-aged woman who engaged in what appeared to prefer non-violent, if annoying and illegal actions to impede ICE that she was not going to suddenly to draw a gun to kill as many ICE officers as she could.
We know from the videos that Ross shooting her did very little to slow down her car. If she had aimed for him, even if he had managed to shoot her, he would have been severely injured.
So objectively speaking, standing too close to dodge in front of suspect's car is in fact reckless, even if you do not have reason to believe that that suspect might consider you Gestapo, or might be panicking or might be distracted and not even have seen you. This is why for example the CBP has explicit rules about not doing that.
I'd agree it's risky, but not reckless. People should generally be free to act under the assumption that someone will not try to murder them under any circumstance that they are not immediately threatening the lives of others. I have no interest in bending social convention to accommodate the homicidal.
But he didn't act under that assumption or else he would not have shot her. What is not reasonable is to assume that someone in the process of backing up while a police officer yells at her repeatedly to get out of her car and while her wife tells her to drive away, is not about to drive away, but also to think that if she does drive away that it will be a murder attempt.
What social convention is being bent? That police can always assume no one will try to hurt them? How is that social convention consistent with their carrying guns?
The convention should be that any person should be able to assume that someone will not try to murder them.
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I strongly disagree that this is some symmetric tribal partisan thing (while agreeing with the premise that yes, many things boil down to that in the general case)
When I watch the videos, I don't jump to a firm position on "what was in the minds of both [parties]". Some things I'm unsure about:
So yeah, I haven't jumped to a strong conclusion about exactly what anyone was thinking in the moment. What I'm certain of is this:
That's instantly disqualifying. Nothing else needed; I'm not assuming anything about anyone's mindset. If you are a wearing a 1.5-ton suit of power armour with wheels, you cannot suddenly accelerate at another human being. You can't.
That's all it boils down to. It doesn't matter if you don't reach high speeds. If you hit him, there's a high chance he's going under. Given that he's close to the side of the car, he's probably going under the tires. So yeah, that's him dead. Even if he doesn't go under, you can pretty trivially die just from smashing your head on the ground. So whether or not it was a "good" shoot, was it acceptable for him to make the shot in the 1 second she gave him to decide how much he valued his life? Yes, absolutely.
So, I don't care whether she intended to run him over, or if (as I think is most likely) she wanted to get away, but considered knocking him over to be acceptably within the range of outcomes.
I'm not happy this happened. It's a tragedy. IIRC she had kids, which makes this more tragic -- unlike her, they played no part in creating this horrible outcome. But I won't lilypad from "it's a tragedy" to "anyone physically involved was in the wrong". She created this situation, and I wish she hadn't. "Do not drive forward when there's a person directly in front of you" is a simple, clear rule that would have kept everyone safe
I hope you don't think I'm a mindkilled Trump-loving lesbian-hater or whatever slamming my keyboard. This just doesn't seem like a tribal split thing; it's a case where actually, the truth of the matter has extremely strong video evidence, and one tribe chooses to ignore that. (I'll also note: each successive video smashes through a different set of anti-ICE excuses, e.g. "she was just a random bystander turning around!", "the wheels were never pointing at him", "he put himself in front of the vehicle!", "she was panicking!" etc -- there's no equivalent the other way.)
What is the truth you are so confident about? That she wasn't there accidentally? That she was trying to kill the ICE officer? That there was no misconduct or poor judgment? You're sure? Really, really sure? 100% sure?
You do seem to recognize the uncertaintiess, whether or not our conclusions are the same. (And you don't even know what why my conclusions are. Hell, right now I'm not sure what my conclusions are.)
My point is that I believe the majority of people commenting, and currently making earnest statements about how certain they are about the truth, would argue the exact opposite position, given the same evidence, if the tribal polarities were reversed.
In other words, everyone who says they are looking at the available video evidence to try to come to an informed conclusion--
I don't believe them*.
(FWIW, I mostly didn't believe anyone was even attempting to be honest during the Floyd and Rittenhouse cases either. I believe them even less now.)
(* "Them" meaning the vast majority. Not literally every single person with an opinion. Go ahead and assume you are an exception.)
You'd have to believe everyone that knows her, including her wife, is lying to believe there's a chance she was there accidentally. Weird one to include in your list of uncertainties; that she was there deliberately to interfere is like the second-most confident thing anyone can state about this situation.
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I hope this isn't getting too recursive, but what do/did you think about the Rittenhouse case?
I'm reluctant to answer both because clearly you want to use it as a litmus test, and because I don't want to start a Rittenhouse subthread, but as I said at the time, I think he was a twerpy hero-wannabe who didn't need to be there, but in the situation he found himself in, he acted in self-defense.
I was legitimately just curious.
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meta comment: as a long-time lurker just commenting now, I'm generally a big fan of how you mod (and comment) -- given that I'm criticising/arguing with you, I should take a moment to say thanks for maintaining this space. It's valuable and good.
Meanwhile, in the fray:
I tried pretty hard to outline exactly what this was. There are bullet points for the features I was uncertain about, largely around their states of mind, and a single bullet point that was the single truth I'm confident of -- specifically, that she accelerated an SUV directly at another human being, and this is an act that can easily kill people.
I think I went overboard on making this clear -- idk how I could've laid it out in a way that would short-circuit this question.
No; no; no; no; no; no.
I specifically outlined "these are the things I'm uncertain of", "these are the things I'm certain of". What part of that makes you think "this is a person who thinks maximally ICEpilled chud takes, and needs to be deprogrammed"? I don't need to be introduced to the concept of less-than-100%-certainty, after a post in which (I'm pretty sure) I made a pretty clear attempt to delineate exactly which things I was confident in.
Though it's not directly relevant, here are my answers to your questions. I believe:
I don't think that was a fair line of implications to throw at me. I've tried to be pretty clear in what parts I'm confident in, and what parts are more ambiguous.
True! And that's fine. My conclusions don't depend on yours, or vice versa. I won't blame you for disagreeing/agreeing with me. Again, I'm just talking about what I saw in the actual physical pixels of the video, which show a person driving a 1.5-ton metal machine towards a fragile human body -- that's the point of my comment. Trying to do theory of mind on each other is overcomplicating things.
Yeah, I broadly agree that this is the state of society in general. I think the Motte, while susceptible to the same dynamic, is much much better (but still flawed! And we're all still human!)
Like, for me personally: I don't live in the US. ICE and US immigration are not directly applicable to me. I don't particularly like Trump, or Biden, or the Republicans, or the Democrats, etc etc. While I'm deeply frustrated with wokeness, I am actually capable of noticing situations where the stopped clock is right twice a day. (Tho even that phrasing is uncharitable, as a stopped clock is wrong by coincidence; occasionally, woke-type arguments are actually correct on their own merits).
You're not entirely wrong, it's just a bit too blackpilled for me to go "everyone is just choosing along tribal lines". Free to disagree, obviously; I just don't think this is the situation where that's the takeaway.
While recognising that you do a ton of work (and produce a ton of content) in the Motte, while I'm basically a newcomer outside of lurking -- dude, come on. I don't think anything I said calls for this kind of (mild) hostility.
I do not think I am some special butterfly. As I'm pretty sure my previous comment implies, and as the existence of the Motte might imply, I believe that there are plenty of people capable of determining their beliefs based on evidence and truth. (If not, what the heck is everyone doing here?)
As an easy example, check out quantumfreakonomic's comment (idk how to tag a user, sorry) concerning Ashley Babbit below, who seems to be the locus of discussion around a "flipped parity" shooting:
Based on a quick scan of quantum's other comments on this topic, that seems like an example of one person not dividing along tribal lines?
Well, ok, but then you're just going to be wrong about some people. You need a finer brush. Yes, many people aren't trying to come to an informed conclusion (probably most). But everyone? No, that's just wrong. And I think there's a real problem with trying to implicitly label objections to that as a claim to higher status ("go ahead and assume you are an exception"). People genuinely do differ, some people try harder than others, we are all fallible. If no one here is trying to find the truth -- which I strongly disagree with -- then idk the point of the Motte, exactly.
I don't. I didn't say that about you (nor have I "called out" anyone specifically). I specifically noted that you recognized the uncertainties (and I avoided getting into where I disagreed with you on specifics).
@ in front of their username.
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... is the rule here that we're allowed to call large swatches of people out as inconsistent without evidence, but just not search through someone's post history to show it for specific individuals who do have that evidence?
Are you disputing that broad swathes of people on both the right and the left are inconsistent, complaining that you think it's against the rules (or should be) to say broad swathes of people on both the right and the left are inconsistent, arguing that only one side is inconsistent and demanding evidence that the other side is also inconsistent, or just asking permission to try to gotcha someone?
I'll take the last option, if it's on the table. But it's not my point. Similarly, I can and have written long top-level digressions on motivated reasoning reason and its failure modes, both on the right and the left; I can highlight other top-level posters today who're pretty clearly not caring about whether what they say is true or not. But whether it's present in general isn't my point, either, and it wasn't the claim you dived in with.
There are claims about a specific thing.
They aren't testable claims. There's no number of doubts in the first days of the Rittenhouse case, or situations like Arbery or Steven Ray Baca (or Babbit!) cases where the same posters have been either ambivalent or opposed to their supposed co-partisans, or others where people were willing to consider the alternative explanations for their supposed enemies. I can show myself literally writing "I'm reserving judgment on this whole thing til we get the bodycam". Doesn't matter, you threw an asterisk on at the last minute, done.
The 'what if the shoe were on the other foot' arguments write themselves. Would you consider it more acceptable were I to dive into a conversation saying, well, I don't think you're being blatantly dishonest, but darwin was three years ago? Because I don't particularly want to do that, but if it's permitted I at least need to consider what responses are available to it.
It wouldn't bug me as much you actually confronted the main truth that the other writer literally spelled out as their major update from the story ("From rest, the driver backed up her 1.5-ton SUV and accelerated towards the ICE agent"). ((or if your examples of things we Can't Be Sure of did not include multiple in strong contradiction with the evidence: so far the best example of motivated reasoning you've given is you)).
But as is, it seems like an epitome of "If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts; if you have the law on your side, pound the law; if you have neither the facts nor the law, pound the table". Regardless of whether it's in the rules or not, what do you think you're even arguing here?
What do you think I'm arguing here?
That's an honest question, because you seem to be accusing me of "pounding the table" for a particular argument, when I have not taken a side on Reed at all, other than gesturing at what I consider to be a number of possibilities, which I explicitly stated were not equally probable.
I infer from your post that you have slotted me into the "anti-ICE, pro-Reed" side, and are seeing everything I post through that lens. Which is what most people do, because if you don't immediately and vigorously sneer and cheer for the right side you're clearly carrying water for the other. This is inane and mindkilling, but here is where even the Motte is now.
If you really wanted to know what I think specifically about any given proposition, you could ask. But people don't do that, they just assume.
My argument is that most of the people on both sides are guilty of motivated reasoning and would change positions if the tribes were reversed, if Reed had been MAGA and Ashli Babbit had been woke. You shouldn't be confused about this, because that's what I said in plain English. But instead you seem to be trying to dig for my unstated tribal priors. You think you know what they are, and you don't.
I think you're arguing that :
And, by conjunction, that people's current assessments are at minimum overconfident or not based on available facts on this particular case. If you can't be bothered to defend it or provide evidence about other people's assessments -- or even highlight the specific ones you think are overconfident and how! -- I don't particularly care what those underlying positions are, and I'm certainly not going to speak on them. There's a fun space for Bulverism, and I'm trying to resist it, and I'm definitely not going to consider it useful to spell out.
And I know you know I didn't speak on your ground-level positions, or make claims about your underlying biases or perceptions related to this particular shooting, because you would have quoted me if I did.
The claim of motivated reasoning could be defended. I don't think it's a particularly strong one in this case, but I haven't exactly had time to evaluate a ton of the evidence for or against. You know what you haven't done? Present any evidence that the poster you responded to here made a claim incompatible with the available evidence. Instead we get hypotheticals that don't exist.
I could debate those! LaVoy Finicum has more overlap with Good than Babbit does, in that they weren't anywhere near a federal politician, they were doing a pretty overtly illegal protest of the type that no one really expects to get arrested nevermind shot over, they had a deadly weapon but it was contestable whether they were a 'real' threat to life before the first bullet rather than just doing something incredibly stupid that could hurt someone, yada yada.
It'd be a useless debate -- Red Tribers could quite aptly point to the many ways the Feds pushed before and misbehaved after the shooting, Blue Tribers can (and regularly do) just say Guns Are Different -- but before we even get there, we have to confront the bit where Finicum wasn't a Red Tribe cause celebre. Not even here. Literally, in the sense that the only person to ever use his name on this site other than me was to say "No one cares." (tbf, two indirect references, [ed: one of which I can't find now]). He had eight mentions in the entire history of TheMotte over at Reddit, four of them were me being ambivalent, and the here's the other four. Nobody's certain from day one that Finicum must be innocent, and that his shooter must be hanged.
But it doesn't matter that it's useless, if that's what it takes to avoid someone pretending "This is inane and mindkilling, but here is where even the Motte is now", while being more insistent to actual bring an actual specific fault of analysis than the broad majority of people you're criticizing. Does it matter for that analysis?
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Gotta say this is a pretty shitty thing to hear from a mod. This is the Culture War thread. There's going to be politicized views and pre-existing bias brought in, sure. I think the Motte is one of the places were people do a pretty good job of laying their cards on the table up front. The effort-posts then do a great job of laying out various positions. To say generally, however, that they don't consider evidence is not only wrong but wronheaded - it demonstrates so mal intent.
My sense is that most (non-Blue Tribe) posters agree and concede that the video evidence here is not as exculpatory as the video evidence for Kyle Rittenhouse was. To me, this suggests that there is reasonable degree of nuance to the thinking here. I'm pretty sure that in Left-controlled spaces, people are just as sure that this shooter was in the wrong as they were about Kyle Rittenhouse.
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Mods are, in fact, allowed to have opinions about posters and posting quality, and while generally the caliber of discussion here is higher than most places on the Internet, you're kidding yourself if you think the same bad habits seen on reddit and X aren't also present here.
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C is impossible given this footage
She glances up twice. Once while backing up and a second time right before she starts driving forward. The first glance occurred while the police was quickly walking across the front of the car. Had the police officer kept walking, he would have been clear of the car when she stopped backing up. But while she's looking down, he stops right in front of her on the driver's side, which means she likely only knew where he was standing after looking up the second time and may not have expected anyone to be in the way.
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I wouldn't say impossible, see inattentional blindness. There are a lot of people driving cars that shouldn't be driving cars but do because you kind of need a car to get anywhere in most of the US.
It certainly doesn't help the side that wants to say she had absolutely no awareness, and does help the side that wants to argue she wanted to run him over intentionally. But also, this happens in a matter of seconds, and I'd think someone with the intention of trying to run over ICE with a car would've done it a different way, and invoking Occum's razor I think the answer that she was being wreckless, and a bad driver is more likely than she saw an opportunity to run over an ICE officer and made a split second decision to run him over.
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Come on man, surely you’ve seen leftists presenting a story like this: “Lady and her partner were on the way home from dropping off their kid at school. They make a wrong turn and completely accidentally end up in the middle of an ICE operation. Agents begin shouting confusing orders including “turn around.” Lady is panicked, tries to comply and do a 3 point turn, agent deliberately positions himself in front of her car and murders her.”
This is an extraordinarily popular narrative online and this convincingly debunks every one of those points. This isn’t some “two screens” rationalist bullshit, this is like Nicholas Sandmann, there is a straightforward lie and there is the truth.
You can still accept this video and say the shot was unjustified, but to say this doesn’t clarify anything just isn’t true
This seems like a strong claim to make without evidence. Extraordinarily popular, really? I'm sure you can find a few people posting such things but it feels like a massive weak man. Certainly I haven't seen such a narrative much at all in places like Reddit and other left wing spaces.
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Yeah, in this situation the Leftists remind me of a defense attorney who reviews the evidence and, on behalf of his client, fabricates the most pro-client narrative that the evidence will permit.
You're being overly charitable. They are certainly not limited to what the evidence will permit.
In a sense, they are. I agree that they will spin and twist and lie very aggressively, but there are still limits. So for example, suppose this Good woman turned out to have posted on social media that she really would like to run over an ICE agent in her SUV. Leftists might claim that this was faked somehow. And if a video came out of her saying the same thing, they might claim it was AI-generated. And so on, but eventually they would change tack. Perhaps they would argue that this evidence is irrelevant because the ICE agent was unaware of it.
And of course sometimes evidence comes out which is so overwhelming that the Left does stop doubling down and instead gives up -- not by conceding that they were wrong but instead by just quietly dropping the subject and pretending the whole incident never happened.
Based on literally this thread, I think they would instead just decline to acknowledge that any such social media post existed. If confronted with it, they would ignore the claim, or vanish and reappear elsewhere to continue making the exact same claims without updating on the new evidence to any degree.
This is at least honest, and I don't hold it against anyone for bowing out of discussion of a Happening where their preferred side looks bad.
I tend to disagree with this, at least in some situations. For example, when the Duke Lacrosse rape hoax took place, a lot of Duke professors and students publicly condemned the men who had been falsely accused. A few national newspapers jumped on the bandwagon. In my view a public apology and some soul-searching was in order.
Absolutely. I meant more any faculty who saw the situation, intuited where it truly ended up, and chose to remain silent. If you've already taken a strong stance, then yeah, you need to openly conform to reality if you want to retain any respect.
But if someone chooses not to engage with a situation in the first place, I'm not going to hold it against them. Every position that everyone holds has at least some evidence against it, or example that makes them look bad. You don't have to go to the mats, die with the lie, go all in for every single one. You can just look at your cards and fold the hand. There's a whole lot of poker left.
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Yes, this is what happens when "My outgroup is evil" is straight up not allowed. When you can't just go "Well, they've lied about literally everything the last 15 years of my life... so I'm just going to assume the worst about them this time."
Obviously every narrative about this shooting from the left was going to be a lie. Did we already forget the cloud of bullshit they kicked up attempting to claim the Kirk shooter was MAGA? The weeks people spent here giving time to lies that were obvious immediately, irrefutable days later, and still trying to be "charitable" to obvious liars wondering in here weeks later from new accounts to discuss if Kirk's shooter was actually MAGA.
I'm reminded, ironically, of one of Sam Harris' criticisms of Donald Trump. Which is that, if he tells 1000 lies, just completely thoughtlessly, maybe 10 seconds per lie, and it takes you 2 hours to disprove each one... Donald Trump still wins because he wasted minutes of his life on the effort and you wasted days if not weeks or months.
So this is me weighing in finally. I don't understand why anybody even entertained a leftist narrative when the obvious reality is that this woman chose every step of this encounter, and fucked around and found out. She was not innocent, confused, wrong place wrong time, panicked, any of it. She's a brainwashed lesbian activist who thought she could run down an ICE agent because she's on the right side of history and Democrats have been telling her she can for years now. She doesn't deserve charity, the people creating fog of war do not deserve charity, evil actually exists no matter how much you claim it's against the rules to discuss.
To say nothing of Tim Walz having every appearance of being willing to cross the Rubicon because the Feds are finally going after his fraud kickbacks. Which is rich after having been beat over the head with "Insurrectionist" for 4 years.
There are no offramps or political solutions. It's between you, your God and your conscience your level of involvement in what's coming. I pray that keeping your head in the sand works out for most of you.
So let me ask you two genuine questions (and to forestall any objections or claims that I am trying to "bait" you-which I have never done, contrary to your repeated assertions- I swear that even if you take this opportunity to insult me in whatever fashion you wish, I grant you immunity):
Is it your genuine sincere belief that every single person identified as being "on the left" is an evil liar? That it's literally impossible for anyone to be a Democrat or a liberal and sincere and well-intentioned?
If we allowed some of those anti-MAGA posters who wander in to post like you do, would you be okay with that, or are you explicitly advocating we make the Motte a "leftists fuck-off" space?
Because the point of not allowing people to just post "My outgroup is evil" is not that no evil people exist or that you cannot believe your enemies are evil. The point is that if people just post how much they hate their enemies with no nuance, context, or argument, we will just have people screaming at each other and competing for who can sneer most dramatically - unless we are just all circle-jerking each other about who our enemies are.
As an actual literal statement the political left is committed to violating black letter constitutional civil rights protections that they justify by inventing human rights, yes, that's a very defensible statement. The adults in the room in the Biden admin(and there were some- not Biden and Kamala, but figures like Ron Klain and Merrick Garland were powerful enough on their own to count) were mostly moderate, establishment, center-left types and not crazy radicals and they... just let the country fall apart while they pursued failed attempts at political vengeance and power consolidation. The war on domestic terror was just full of oversteps that make no sense except as retribution against dissidents against state ideology, the novel legal theories, etc. Meanwhile actual competent governance was... not a priority. The null hypothesis for both a Biden admin and a vegetable in the white house is that technocrats from his own party run the country in a not-cartoonish manner with some featherbedding.
Trump talks about some of this stuff. But he doesn't actually do it.
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I think they do evil. I think at this point to be a Democrat is to be deeply committed to doing evil. The hills Democrats have chosen to die on (castrating children, giving billions in fraud to immigrants of questionable legality, forcing people to take experimental medications, mass censorship) are virtually unrecognizable from the Democrats of 30 years ago. All the good ones left the party and joined the Republican ticket. Which is probably why so many high ranking positions in Trump's administration got filled with former Democrats (RFK Jr, Tulsi).
I have in laws who are deeply committed Democrats, deeply committed to destroying the country. They don't think of it that way. They are hopelessly, and willfully, ignorant of the consequences of their policies. If "Evil" had a version of "without intent" like manslaughter, they'd be that. All the same...
If they were honest. I only care about honesty. They may view me as evil, for caring about my heritage, and wanting it to continue to exist. For not wanting billions of 3rd worlders enshittifying my homeland. For the very fact that my ancestors conquered this nation in the first place. And these are the exact reasons these differences can only be sorted out finally. I cannot exist in their world, and they cannot exist in mine. We are mutually evil to one another. I find their morality an abhorrent inversion of proper morals, and they feel the same. I can recognize this however, and accept that it's all over now but the violence. We cannot coexist.
But only if they are honest. If they stroll in here like Darwin of yore, playing Arguments as Soldiers, refusing to be pinned down, refusing to ever admit what the negative space around their rhetoric is gesturing towards, fuck em.
Which goes straight to it, and you see this over and over and over again. The leftist always calibrates their speech towards maximum fog of war. Among their own it's "Yes, I want to destroy the white race." but then in public it's "Oh why can't we have sympathy for the 65 IQ serial rapist an NGO imported from Africa? He just needs more restorative justice. That 3 year old probably won't even remember what happened to it." Which also goes straight to why LibsOfTiktok went so viral. These people just put all that nonsense out there, under their real ass names, employment in bio, and thought they were the victims when people outside their bubble saw it. Because, like Hillary Clinton famously said, sometimes you have two sets of opinions, a public set and a private set. It was an invasion of privacy to see their private opinions... even when they posted them publicly.
Do you believe your in-laws literally want you dead and your daughter transed?
I suspect not. (If you do- well, I don't know what to say except that must make things tense at Christmas.) This is the problem with such absolute statements.
Wrong question. People love to abstract evil away into mustache-twirling schemes to deliberately do harm, so they never have to face the evil in their own hearts. Evil isn't doing a "paperclip optimizer" routine, but for double mastectomies, it's convincing yourself your cause is so good, that you can, say, lie to promote / defend it because the chuds would """weaponize""" the truth.
What you want to ask in the case of his in-laws is, if his daughter said she's trans and he opposed it, would they hear him out, or write him off as a transphobe? Or for the "want him dead" part: if the cancel mob came after him, would they defend his character, or throw him under the bus (or for a borderline case: squirm like Alec Holowka's sister, hinting at the truth, but refusing to state it outright for fear of the mob going after her as well)?
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No, but they literally keep voting for local politicians who have that as their party platform. They just... I donno, refuse to grapple with that part of things.
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Declaring someone a mortal irreconcilable enemy provides them with the best possible reason to stop being honest with you, or trying. There is no honor to be won being honest with moral aliens.
Well yes. Thats another reason i hate my enemies. They don't even have the descency to admit it and have a fair fight. Its just gas lighting about their naked aggression 24/7.
What did you think being mortal enemies was? Essays? Vibes?
According to you, someone who you declared should literally be wiped out as the only reconciliation is supposed to be decent to you?
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I realize these questions are directed at someone else, but I feel like answering them:
Pretty much yes. It's become an evil ideology. People who adhere to evil ideologies are -- to a greater or lesser extent -- evil themselves.
I think that's a slightly different question, since, generally speaking, people are very good at self-deception. I think there are plenty of (evil) Leftists who genuinely and sincerely believe in the lies they spread and genuinely and sincerely believe that they are trying to make the world a better place.
Personally, I'm fine with Leftists posting here since (at least for now) they cannot engage in their usual tactics of shouting down their opposition; ideologically capturing the moderation team and abusing those powers to silence their adversaries; etc.
How are you defining "left"? By the standards of the Motte, I am on the left. (I'm more likely to vote Democrat than not, I don't like Trump, I think *-isms are bad, etc.) So does this make me "evil" or do I not count because I'm sufficiently gray? (Go ahead and call me evil if you insist, I am genuinely trying to figure out how you are modeling other minds.)
Okay, but that necessarily means we don't let you shout them down either.
Hey now, that moved to the right over the last 10 years. Official left position has long been that -isms are good, as long as they target the right groups.
No, the "official left position" has long been that behavior that would be classified as a *-ism when targeting groups they support isn't a *-ism when targeting groups they don't, allowing them to continue claiming *-isms are bad without having to give up discriminatory behavior against groups they don't favor.
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That's a complicated question, because in many ways Leftism is not a specific set of beliefs but rather a process by which people compete for social status and power by pretending to be morally superior by making use of what Larry Auster called the "liberal script." But here's a rough and ready definition for you: If you could unironically put one of those signs in your front yard which says "In this house we believe," then it is highly likely you are a Leftist. I haven't paid specific attention to your posts so I don't know if I would call you a Leftist.
That's fine with me. For the most part, the positions espoused by Leftism can't really stand up to fair scrutiny. In the absence of underhanded tactics, Leftism will lose.
I definitely would not put one of those signs in my yard. But I know who people who would and do, and while they make me cringe, they are not evil.
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Yes, I have seen that narrative. "Good was there accidentally" I guess is arguably included in option (f) but I considered it unlikely. Even taking it as a given that she was there intentionally, my point stands.
People here considered it, and I'm pretty sure that poster even did so in good faith. Of your own proposals, the video seems to at least significantly reduce the possibility of b and c.
I'm not going to say anything with confidence yet -- we don't even have confirmation this is real video! -- but there's a long distance between 'absolute 100% proof' and not 'particularly clarifying'.
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